Law firm web marketing: is the site or the campaign at fault?
Web marketing for a law firm fails most often at the destination rather than the campaign. If the site was built before 6 December 2018, when the SRA Transparency Rules came into force, it is missing pages the highest-intent searches ask for. This page shows how to tell which of the two is your constraint.
Last updated: 5 August 2026
Is the problem the marketing or the website?
Usually the website, and there is a test that separates the two without spending anything.
A campaign is a method of sending people to a page. If the page was not built to receive them, more traffic produces more of nothing, and produces it faster. That is the whole of the diagnosis, and it is unwelcome from a supplier whose income depends on selling the campaign.
| What you are seeing | Where the constraint probably sits | The test that settles it |
|---|---|---|
| Visits arrive and the phone stays quiet | The destination | Read your own conveyancing page as a stranger would. Does it say what the work costs and how long it takes? |
| Ads run at a normal click price and produce nothing | The destination | Check where the ad points. If it points at the home page, that is the answer |
| Nobody finds the firm for work it actually does | The pages do not exist | Search your own site for the practice area. If there is no page, there is nothing to rank |
| The site reads well on a desktop and badly on a phone | The destination | Complete your own enquiry form, on your own mobile, from outside the office wifi |
| Enquiries arrive and go cold | Neither. Intake | Time how long a web enquiry sits before somebody replies to it |
Four of those five rows point at the site. The fifth points inside the firm.
A damaging admission, in the first screen rather than at the point of invoice: we do not fix the fifth row. Intake is operational, it sits with the people who answer the telephone, and any marketing supplier who says they solve it is describing software or a call centre. It still belongs in this conversation, because it decides whether anything above it was worth buying.
What does pointing a campaign at an old site actually cost?
The full price of the click, every time, with nothing recovered.
In Liverpool, 390 people a month search for a personal injury solicitor, and Google charges around £69.26 for one of those clicks. Residential conveyancing in the same city runs at 1,760 searches a month and £15.41. Both figures were measured on 3 August 2026 across twenty UK cities.
Twenty Liverpool personal injury clicks is £1,385.20. That is arithmetic on the click price and not a forecast of anything. What it buys is twenty strangers delivered to whatever page the advertisement points at. If that page does not say what a claim costs, how it is funded, or what happens in the first fortnight, the £1,385.20 has bought twenty people the chance to read a page that answers none of the questions that made them search.
The same money spent on the page itself is spent once and keeps working. That is not an argument for never advertising. It is an argument for sequence.
Why does the date the site was built matter so much?
Because the brief changed on 6 December 2018 and most sites were written to the older one.
The SRA Transparency Rules came into force on 6 December 2018 and require firms to publish price and service information for specified work types. We checked the position again on 3 August 2026. A site designed before that date was designed for a brief in which cost was a conversation to be had on the telephone, not a page to be published.
That matters commercially as well as procedurally. 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions — the single largest group. A site built to avoid the cost question is built to lose the search that asks it.
Which of a firm's services fall within the rules is a question for the firm and its own advisers. We build the pages a firm tells us to publish. We do not judge whether a firm complies, and nobody outside the firm and its COLP can.
Which of these suppliers publish a price you can plan against?
None of the four named here, which is the ordinary condition of this market rather than an accusation.
| Supplier | Published a price on 3 August 2026 |
|---|---|
| legal-marketing.co.uk | No |
| novicell.com | No |
| themodernfirm.com | No |
| deckerdesign.com | No |
Across all 40 suppliers we read in full on that date:
| Count | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Published any price | 12 / 40 | 30% |
| Published a range rather than a figure | 5 / 40 | 13% |
| Claimed a guarantee of some kind | 8 / 40 | 20% |
| Stated no minimum term | 1 / 40 | 3% |
⚠ We record whether a price appeared, not what it was. Our tooling collected figures that mixed genuine fees with case values and stray fragments, and attributing one of those to a named business would publish something unverified about a competitor.
The practical consequence for the diagnosis on this page is narrow but real. If you cannot see what a rebuild costs, you cannot compare it against the cost of the traffic you are currently wasting, and the sequencing decision gets made on instinct instead.
What does the repair cost, and when is a rebuild not the answer?
| What | Price |
|---|---|
| Price Transparency Pack | £890, delivered in 10 working days |
| Firm Site | £2,400 |
| Firm Site+ | £4,200 |
| Authority Build | £6,900 |
| Retainer | £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month, no minimum term |
Take £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer. Fixed, published, and never priced per enquiry, per lead or per matter — LASPO 2012 section 56 prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business including personal injury, and it binds the firm paying as well as the party being paid.
Three situations where the rebuild is the wrong purchase and we will say so before taking the instruction:
- Only the price information is missing. The site renders on a phone, the practice-area pages exist, and the gap is the disclosure pages. That is the £890 pack, finished in ten working days, not the £2,400 build.
- The constraint is fee-earner capacity. More enquiries then produce declined instructions and a longer waiting list. Nothing on this page helps with that.
- The firm needs instructions this quarter. Rebuilding and then waiting for organic search takes longer than the quarter has. Paid campaigns are the honest answer, and we do not manage ad spend.
Where is another supplier the better choice?
Two cases, stated plainly, because a comparison that always concludes with us is read as an advertisement and discarded.
When what the firm wants is an identity rather than a site. A rebrand, a mark, a set of guidelines and a tone of voice is a design commission. We build pages that answer searches, which is a narrower job, and a firm that wants the wider one should buy the wider one.
When the firm has an in-house marketer who needs a pair of hands rather than a supplier. Somebody in the building can chase fee earners for the material an external supplier waits three weeks to receive. That advantage is real and no agency arrangement reproduces it.
Before you shortlist anyone
We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026, including several that appear on searches like this one. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.
The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat the exercise rather than take ours. It also shows how many people search for your practice areas in your town, and what those clicks cost to buy at Google's own prices.
Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →
No call required. Our own prices are on that page.
Where should I read next?
If the diagnosis pointed at the site: law firm website design cost covers what a rebuild involves at each price, and law firm website design services covers what is included.
For a smaller practice: small law firm website design covers doing this with two fee earners rather than twenty.
By practice area: personal injury law firm seo covers the area with the highest click prices in the UK dataset.
Wider than the site: law firm marketing services.
Frequently asked questions
How do I tell whether my website or my marketing is the problem?
Look at where the failure happens: visits arriving with no calls, ads pointing at the home page, or no visibility at all for work the firm does. Four of the five common symptoms point at the site, and the fifth points at intake inside the firm.
Why does a campaign pointing at an old site waste money?
Because the click is paid for whether or not the page can receive it. Twenty Liverpool personal injury clicks is £1,385.20 as arithmetic on the £69.26 measured on 3 August 2026, and a page that does not answer cost, funding or timescale returns none of it.
Does the date my site was built really matter?
Yes, because the brief changed. The SRA Transparency Rules came into force on 6 December 2018 and require price and service information for specified work types, so a site written before then was written for a market in which cost was a telephone conversation.
Do I need a rebuild or just the missing pages?
If the site renders on a phone and the practice-area pages exist, the gap is usually the price information, which is the £890 Price Transparency Pack in ten working days rather than the £2,400 build. We will say so before taking the instruction.
Which website suppliers publish a price?
Of the four named on this page, none did on 3 August 2026. Across all 40 suppliers read that day, twelve published any price, five published a range rather than a figure, and one stated no minimum term.
Can you charge me per enquiry instead?
No. LASPO 2012 section 56 prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business including personal injury, and it binds the firm paying as well as the party being paid, so our pricing is fixed by scope and never per enquiry, lead or matter.
Will fixing the website make my firm compliant?
No. Whether a firm complies is a judgement for the firm and its COLP. We build the pages a firm tells us to publish and can say factually which items are absent from a site, which is a different thing.